Because on my feed there’s an image of a foggy morning in Safdarjung

 

I once knew a tree - a long time ago –

as I walked by she used to sigh over me,

she formed the backdrop to a favourite photo,

starlight was filtered through her canopy.

 

I knew her bark, her long-tailed leaf shadows,

the sounds and textures of storms in her limbs,

the comings and goings of doves and sparrows,

the poetry of her seasons verbatim.

 

It’s been a long time since I’ve left her shade,

years since I’ve felt her sigh on my commutes.

All memories, glorious or not, must fade,

all leaves diverge away from their roots.

 

But even so. They’re made of the same sap.

And her fogged image is a happy recap.

You know how life sometimes feels like one of those painter's shade cards? - with little square patches from every shade of terrible to awful to merely bad, and yet you're still awestruck by it because it still looks all kinds of amazing overall?  Well, that's my life right now, and that image of a fogged up, eerie tree in a winter morning in Delhi was beyond feel-good.

I sometimes think of Delhi

You too are not my mother

yet there is on my body

a second navel, a mark,

a closed, healed mouth of a scar

where the pulsing cord was severed

between us finally.

I don’t look at navels often.

I’ve travelled perhaps too far;

sometimes I spot a rampart,

an alien ringed boulevard,

the glint of foreign waters.

And I think of you then.

Of course there is no return;

no-one knows that better than me.

Each spring new flowers, new shoots;

brisk autumns of foreign fruit.

But somewhere a jamun tree

still dances in its crushed-fruit skirt.

Mother's Day is being celebrated here in Egypt today. Yasmin deshe yadachar. I am greatly fortunate in that I have more than one mother. Remembering and honouring all the women who grew me up and the places they grew me up in. Happy Mother's Day!